Acer Nitro 5 AN517-51
Great gaming performance for the money, and with a 120Hz screen to boot, but the Nitro 5 has a catch
PRICE £849 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
Gaming laptops and heavyweight prices go together like nitro and glycerine, but Acer’s Nitro 5 range aims to buck this trend. There are many models of
Nitro 5 to choose from, including 15in variants, but here I’m testing a 17in Core i7-9750H machine that’s identified by the part number NH.Q9BEK.004. Note that it’s only available from currys.co.uk.
In terms of style, think plastic and chunky: weighing 2.6kg even before you take the power brick into account, which measures 403 x 280 x 27mm (WDH), so you’ll struggle to slot it into the average backpack. The rear edge is dominated by a row of exhaust ports, and if you flip the laptop over you can watch the dual cooling fans at work. These are backlit by red LEDs, fitting in with the laptop’s colour scheme.
Acer equips the Nitro 5 with plenty of ports, with two USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 slots (5Gbits/sec), one USB-C port, an HDMI 2 output and an Ethernet jack all fitted on the left edge. Over on the right edge, you’ll find one USB-A 2 port, a 3.5mm audio jack and a DC power input. There’s no SD card slot, but note the one-megapixel webcam embedded into the thick forehead bezel (it isn’t Windows Hello-compatible).
Much like the chassis, the keyboard materials feel built to a budget. Keys have plenty of travel but elicit loud clacks with each press, and the otherwise sturdy keyboard base plate has a little more give as you move towards the numeric keypad. Every key has a red outline accentuated by a red backlight, which has four brightness settings.
The WASD and arrow keys have extra red outlines to help them stand out.
The touchpad is spacious and responsive, but not the best quality: it let out a worrying creak when the left and right clickers were pressed down firmly, suggesting that its construction isn’t terribly robust.
Initially, the Nitro 5’s display appears to be everything you’d want from a gaming machine. It’s a 17.3in IPS panel with a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution and a refresh rate of 120Hz, which means you should enjoy games at their smooth best. A peak brightness of 274cd/m² is on the lower side but it’s still easily viewable indoors, while its 1,185:1 contrast ratio is highly respectable.
Where the Nitro 5 disappoints is colour reproduction. The panel only covers 57.4% of the sRGB colour gamut with an average Delta E of 5.62, and this means colours not only lack vibrancy but that textures blend into one another; it’s as if the screen has been set permanently to Night Light mode, with atrocious accuracy among all primary colours. For me, this is a deal-breaker. It’s no good if onscreen gaming action is smooth if their rich, detailed environments look washed out and lifeless.
Powering the Acer Nitro 5 is a ninth-generation Intel Core i7-9750H processor with a base clock speed of 2.6GHz and a maximum frequency of 4.5GHz. This Coffee Lake CPU is backed by 8GB of DDR4 RAM, pushing the Nitro 5 to an overall score of 164 in our benchmarks – a solid result even when placed next to far more expensive machines such as the Gigabyte Aero 17 ( see p50). My only caveat is that, if you can find another £300 or so, the Asus TUF Gaming A15 ( pcpro.link/312asus) scored 282 thanks to AMD’s Ryzen 4800H processor and 16GB of RAM.
“You’ll appreciate sequential read and write speeds of 2,961MB/sec and 1,514MB/sec in the middle of a gaming session”
Like the Asus, the Acer Nitro 5 packs Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. It ran Metro: Last Light in 1080p at High settings at an average frame rate of 127fps and even managed 34.3fps in the gruelling Hitman 2 1080p Mumbai benchmark. Games launch snappily on the Nitro 5 too, thanks to the astounding speeds of its 256GB SSD: you’ll definitely appreciate sequential read and write speeds of 2,961MB/sec and 1,514MB/sec in the middle of a gaming session. Battery life proved respectable, with the 57Wh battery keeping the Nitro going for 5hrs 38mins in our standardised video playback test.
In the Nitro 5 AN517, Acer has created both a well specified and attractively priced 17in gaming laptop. The question is whether you care about the areas of sacrifice, with the poor display quality being the most obvious. Although it can play games in Full HD at 120fps, they are robbed of their vibrancy due to desperately poor gamut coverage and colour accuracy. However, if you only care about gaming performance, the Acer Nitro 5 is a good-value choice. Just note that the Asus TUF Gaming A15 is speedier still and provides a far more generous (and sensible) 1TB SSD for another £300.
SPECIFICATIONS
Hexa-core 2.6GHz Core i7-9750H processor 8GB DDR4-2600 RAM 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics 17.3in non-touch IPS display, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD 1-megapixel webcam 2x2 802.11ax Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 HDMI 2 x USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 USB-A 2 Gigabit Ethernet port 3.5mm jack 57Wh battery Windows 10 Home 403 x 280 x 26.9mm (WDH) 2.6kg 1yr limited warranty model number: NH.Q9BEK.004